Enigma Complex
by atree
Summary: The brain was not made to house two minds.


He never asked for the clarity. He never asked to be born with an eidetic memory, and after Ruru's reintegration (the word _kiss_ cannot convey the full subtlety of cross-space synaptic consolidation), his mental capacity magnified pentationally, a flame fanned into supernova so hot his brain felt as if it would melt through his skull. He never asked to see the world reduced to polygons and equations, differentials and probabilities, every point of the noosphere as solid and _real_ as if he has drawn it in his sketchbook and hung it in the space between his eyes. The world is alien when a square turns into a tesseract of four-dimensional space.

Most of all, he never asked for _her_.

 _"You knew what you were getting into,_ " she snickers. _"Don't make any excuses."_

He suspected, of course. When Mai shattered the crystal that bound Enigma, he was curious. Phantoms cannot be destroyed any more than an idea can be destroyed. Phantoms can only be sealed away, yet there must be a place to seal them in to: a sketchbook, a stomach, a longitudinal wave. Yet he had none of those on hand. When Enigma's corporeal body is gone, where would her Phantom mind go?

The answer was, of course, _him_.

 _"Don't sound so sullen,"_ she whispers in the uncharted recesses of his brain. _"I know you're pleased. After all, I know your every thought."_

"Shut up," he says.

The other members in art class stare at him.

"Just talking to myself," he says hastily, picking up his brush.

The phantom giggles. _"None of them understand. Don't you find it boring?"_

He ignores her, focusing on his painting of the vase. Or, not quite a vase – a convex dual-bounded orthoplex that he has to try very hard to reduce back into an amalgamation of Euclidean solids. Art has become difficult for him – no, difficult isn't the right word. Evolved. The art teacher has noted his change in style. From photorealism to expressionism, mimicry to alteration. Mai and Reina also find strange his choice of perspective; Koito, too, has realized, and what others exclaim she conveys with a single upraised eyebrow. They suspect, but they cannot imagine the magnitude.

 _"Kill them,"_ Enigma says. _"You know you can."_

He picks up the brush dipped in red paint and begins to work on the flowers.

 _"You can't lie to me,"_ she says. _"You can deny it to everyone else, deny it to yourself, but you can't lie to me. I know power. You beat me. You_ destroyed _me. And you lie awake in bed and wonder what else you can destroy. If there is even a limit to what you can create. Well, there's only one way to find out."_

 _"You're insane."_

She laughs, a high, clear, ringing laughter that rebounds inside his skull like church bells. She has been laughing often lately. For someone experimented on, for someone obsessed with power, for someone who once (and currently) tried to destroy the world – Enigma's laughter is surprisingly carefree.

 _"We can rule the world, if you would only take it. But there's no rush."_ She smiles, and he sees her smile in his mind's eye: purple lips stretched like a butcher's knife. _"After all, we have the rest of our lives together."_

He paints a green gash for the stem, bleeding five crimson petals. On the windowsill, Ruru is napping, splayed out in the sun. Ruru is the start of all this, not so much a key fitting into a lock but a ray of sunlight waking a sleeper. Try as he might, Haruhiko cannot remember creating her. The brain has a curious relationship with reality. Himeno theorizes Ruru is a manifestation of his repressed id. Mai, Reina, and Koito prefer to think of Ruru as a regular – if overly attached – phantom. Haruhiko has his own theory. He finds that his memories of his mother are diluted with memories of Ruru, that where one is strong, the other is weak. A child's brain is sensitive; the subconscious does whatever it must to save the conscious from total mental collapse. Tragedy is often the catalyst for neural error phenomenon.

He paints soft shadows against the glass.

" _You said you enjoyed our time together."_

He doesn't know why he asked the question – and it is a question, in statement form.

Enigma pauses.

" _I said it in my last moments. When I thought it would have no consequence_."

 _"Did that make it any less true?"_

He feels her silence like a skein of ice stretched beneath his skull. His own response sits unspoken in that space between their minds: _I, too, enjoyed it_ – but there is no mystery there, no wonder in why a child adores the return of a lost parent. The mystery lies with the Phantom. Why would someone who hates humans enjoy time spent with a human?

 _"You weren't there,"_ Enigma says at last, softly. _"Alayashiki does not treat its test subjects kindly. I was not the only one. I was simply the first and last success. They could not replicate me, so instead they used me as much as they could. Like a pig, butchered so every part would sell. There was a lot of pain, and blackouts – I won't bore you with the details. I was alone. The only people I knew were the scientists, and I despised every single one of them. They did not die peacefully."_

A vision flashes across Haruhiko's mind, so stark and vivid he feels wrenched from space and time: a white room decorated with corpses, the air rotten with the smell of blood and innards and ringing with laughter from a voice not his own. When he comes to, the art room is spinning. He gasps for breath. A black smear stretches across the canvas where his hand has fallen.

 _"Now you know the feeling of murder,"_ Enigma laughs, and he is grateful that it is not the same laughter. _"Start now. Here. You don't know any of these people."_

He takes a deep breath. The smell of blood is replaced with the smell of art supplies, and the image of the lab is reduced to the tenebrosity of a washed-out photograph. He sets down the brush.

 _"Answer my question."_

Enigma should have no more substance than a figment of his imagination, yet in that moment Haruhiko sees her as vividly as if she were sitting across from him, posing as an artist's model. She scowls and turns her head. She crosses her arms and leans away from him and flips her hair, all the while glaring at him from the corners of her eyes. The purple spirals trapped within her pupils spin like pinwheels. And after perhaps half a minute of silence, realizing it is no use, she grinds her teeth and mutters, as if each word is being wrenched from her throat:

 _"Because you were kind to me."_

But she never says that, of course – because she is Enigma.

(But she thinks it, and that is enough).


End file.
